Download Notion

Get Notion from our git repo. Since commits merged into the master branch need proof-reading by another contributor, it is relatively stable. Stable releases are also available via GitHub.

Supplemental Software

The intent of this page is to collect software that is known to integrate well with a Notion setup. Because notion is a rather minimalistic window manager, not a desktop environment, other software is required for a full working system.

Some tweaking may be required in order to fully integrate it with your setup.

System tray

These trays can be used to add tray icon functionality either to Notion’s integrated status bar (although we recommend using a panel, most of which include support for tray icons, see below).

  • stalonetray shows FreeDesktop (XEmbed) and KDE trayicons
  • trayion shows FreeDesktop (XEmbed) trayicons (like Qt4 and gtk2), integrates well with Notion’s built-in status bar (mod_statusbar), but seems abandoned. Can embed itself into mod_statusbar.

Panels

  • xfce4-panel — the classic panel from XFCE. Includes various widgets, most notably volume control, battery, clock, disk usage, system tray, application launcher.
  • polybar — A status bar written in C++, supporting modules and .ini-file customization. Plugins working with notion include volume control, clock, filesystem usage, keyboard layout, memory usage, cpu usage, battery, temperature

Clipboard utilities

  • autocutsel for keeping various clipboards synchronized
  • parcellite more advanced clipboard management (with history)

Notification daemons

  • notification-daemon shows only 1 notification at a time
  • notify-osd shows only 1 notification at a time
  • xfce4-notifyd shows a title bar
  • dunst — A customizable and lightweight notification-daemon, can show multiple notifications at a time by stacking them on top of the screen

Program launchers and input handling

While notion comes with its own mod_query, some external tools have sprung up over the decades, which can be more easily used from shell-scripts to handle input. The most well-known of these are:

  • dmenu — very lightweight
  • rofi — self-proclaimed replacement for dmenu

Screen lockers

Notion ships with a script called notion-lock, which tries to invoke the following commands in the following order:

  • xscreensaver — the classic screensaver for X11
  • i3lock — i3’s lock screen, not a screensaver
  • xlock — I’m not sure which one is older, xscreensaver or xlock(more).

X11 lock screens only lock the X display, not the entire console display, so someone attempting a VT-switch (Ctrl+Alt+F<1..12>) will not be prevented from doing so. Furthermore, it is not very reliable, since windows can still move themselves in front of the lock screen window (which is an ordinary X11 window pushing itself into the foreground). For more information, see Why screen lockers on X11 cannot be secure.

The following locking applications use the console and attempt to be more secure:

  • vlock — official master site is unfortunately gone, some forks exist
  • physlock — possibly inspired by vlock, seems maintained

Other utilities

These utilities fit well into the Notion workflow, according to some users.

  • arandr — a flexible tool for manipulating your monitor layout, resolutions, orientations

Terminals

  • xterm — The classical X11 terminal. Known to be ugly by default, it can be configured using ~/.Xdefaults.
  • rxvt-unicode — Also known as urxvt. Known for its good unicode support. Configurable via ~/.Xdefaults. Supports perl scripting and comes with a bunch of scripts for various useful tasks such as scrollback search, opening urls with keyboard shortcuts, etc.

Image viewers

  • feh — minimalist image viewer
  • sxiv — still minimalist, includes features like thumbnails, gif playback, custom keybindings

Untested, please review

  • dzen2 — highly customizable status bar construction toolkit
  • xmobar — status bar originating from xmonad
  • i3bar — status bar from i3 (not to be confused with ion3)
  • lxpanel — the official LXDE status bar

Generally, this document only serves as a list of links right now. If you feel like contributing a guide for any of these or other notion related tools because you have experience with them, please write a markdown document and send it to us (preferably via pull-request). Feel free to contact us.